a collective dream journal project

Category Archives: night

We must use the alien technology. In the real quiet air of the salon you wanted to stay. The people were in place but filling the air with self un-poisoned by some erractic music. They were filled with a self-possession that stills people like jazz mutes the motion and they wore fedoras and stares; the whole thing of it you liked. We sat and had conversations while it rained. Alien food, filets, and pink almost creamed roe. A green cat stared, a tiny neonate on a lap peered over darkened wood. Tea brewed. The woman with silver embellishments and turquoise, darked eyes, went back to sleep in the hotel room for five days of sleep, happy song on her lips to be alone. I held cards in my hand and tried to say we must never say what we saw here. I was corrected. We must share the technology. IN an instant, almost a lump in my throat I saw why. It was a series of wooden rails heading skyward in a factory. There was a whirring and a flapping of tiny wooden flaps. I nailed in nails. It was so simple and yet it had a perfection I cannot name. I watched her leave to go sleep. Her beauty and self-suficiency were inside me like a memory. I stood shaking the blue skirt filled with cranberry paisley, and silver near a mirror above a small wooden table. I went out into the darkness and entered a convenience store somewhere at midnight on a hill where you could feel the earth larger than the buildings;a manna pool around it’s concrete shell. It was one of those places that is respite because it has human build to it in a place of large earth-dark forces, where wisps of heather, and moor grass even appearing as spirits in the halogen lights. Inside past the smoked bullet proof glass, the proprietess behind her small packs of wares, a larder of tiny pills, and impersonal cartons of condoms, or advil(either really). I turned and the tiny shack opened into the dim almost waxy, paraffin of music venue floors. Wooden equipment ramps, signage indicating the temporal atmosphere of an occasion. I saw pin up magnets and then I talked to the woman with red lips and her name was Susanna Lou or some other staged, two-part name. She invited me somewhere to perform.

It is night. I walking around with my brother Bobby and former housemate Michelle. We are in one of those uncomfortable American hybrid urban/suburban environments. I don’t know how late it is, but there is no one in the streets, and only white vans are parked all around. Michelle asks us to accompany her to a dodgy fast food place a few blocks away. She wants a burger. We agree and follow her. As we approach the yellow glowing “Burger Chase” a nervousness creeps up my spine.
I’m barefoot, and before we enter I see the floors are grimy and wet, as well as one of those “no shirt, no shoes, no service” decals on the door. I hesitate entering at first, but do anyway thinking the employees won’t really give a shit about my feet, and that I will just wash them soon after. When we go in I see to my right a row of booths, each closed in by waist high glass doors and filled with water reaching just above ankle height. People are sloshing around in the water and eating. I find it strange and gross, but try not to stare. The ordering counter runs the full length of the place and red crudely handwritten signs are taped the whole way down. There is a door at the opposite end. As we walk down the counter I read the signs. They say, “Put all of your belongings on the counter. You will be cut by a large knife if you don’t. If you try to escape or look panicked you will be cut”.
I’m pissed. How did we walk into this trap? The people behind the counter are freakishly tall, but don’t necessarily look mean, they almost seem as if they too are following silent orders. A person who was eating in one of the nasty water booths walks out the door I’m standing next too. I step out and motion to my brother to come. He hesitates but my persistent looks get him to leave. I think about Michelle for a moment, but knew that if I tried to get her to come we all would definitely be caught. I console my selfish action saying to myself that I will send help.
Bobby and I are running full speed through the darkness. The lights of a parked white van turn on, and its engine kicks on. We keep running, and don’t seem to be followed. When we get to my parents’ neighborhood Bobby begins knocking on all of the doors and telling them about the place. When no one seems to care, I wake up. ♨

In a land of perpetual night I took to sitting in the bed of a red pick-up truck on a fairly regular basis. The truck was parked in my suburban childhood neighborhood, down Graeloch Road. I would just sit in it and think, and I always left it neat and exactly as I found it. The owner sometimes starred at me from his house window, but never said anything; I suppose he knew I wasn’t doing any harm. One time as I was getting ready to leave, he came outside. I was nervous, I didn’t know what to do. I took nothing from the truck, although this time it seemed to be lined with bait: a tube of cookies, a nice coat (that I initially thought was mine), even a little money. The owner didn’t say anything to me. In fact, I knew him — he was a kind new-agey man in his late 30s, too kind, to the point that he was a bit stupid.
One of the neighbors emerged from him home from across the street. He was in a panic. He immediately asked if we were donors, and said franticly, “she needs blood right now!” I didn’t trust him at all, something about his face and tone wouldn’t let me. I declined to aid the situation and made up an excuse to take my leave. The new-agey man did not. I was nervous for him, and asked for his phone number as he climbed into the strange man’s small car; but I didn’t get it all, he was too caught up in the situation’s distraught energy.
I later found out that he was drained of all his blood and left out in the woods for no particular reason. That man across the street . . . I see him sometimes, in other dreams. He has shoulder length hair, and he’s always sweating and in a frenzy. His greeting smile is a bit crooked. I’ve seen him before in waking life too, but I don’t recall where. ♨

I am living in an old house with my friend Michelle. The place is a disaster. The only places that have any cohesion are our individual bedrooms. The house is windowless, and creepy art is everywhere. My brother and a mutual friend are coming. I am waiting for them, nervously for some reason. When they finally arrive I give them drinks and go upstairs in search of Michelle. She is working on a project in the corner with multiple sets of bird wings. In her room I also have a collection of human legs. They line one of the walls. They are my legs, and I can still sense and move them. I have a habit of skinning them with what resembles a large fruit peeler. I do this a lot — and though the inner sensation is not comfortable, the visual and textural experience is exquisite. Michelle thinks my habit is gross. I also carve fine lines into them. On the lower calf of the legs I have made a series of six uniform horizontal lines about one inch in depth. I am skinning the thighs now, preparing them for individual carvings. ♨

I lived in a city only about a 7 hour drive from Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. I started coming to visit the town on very regular basis. Riverbend (a hot springs spa) didn’t exist as it does today — it was more of hostel again. Travelers stayed in the owner’s home. I was coming so often that I had my own room. EL, the owner, was always warm and welcoming whenever I showed up, and he was a bit surprised that I didn’t care to go to other places. One evening EL was planning a meeting of some kind inside. I went outside and started chatting with some travelers. The night sky was filled with absolutely gorgeous constellations — constellations I had never seen before. The stars had lines connecting them into intricate patterns, and some were encircled within radiant glowing auras. I was staring at them for a few minutes when one of most prominent constellation in the north began moving. It was swirling in various directions. And in rapid succession other constellations began performing similar tricks. Some faded into nothing after trailing across the sky. It felt as if they were putting on a show for me. The entire sky was dancing. Directly before me was a single star with a circle around it (the alchemical symbol of the Sun). Someone told me it was Taurus, and so it was in the dream. (I am an Aries/Taurus cusp.) Suddenly, the night sky began to ripple like water, the Taurus star was the center point from where the rippling started. I went inside to ask EL about this phenomenon. He was eating some sort of entheogen and said that he had witnessed this countless times before in the New Mexican sky, and that he had finally grown to understand that the constellations are actually ships and the sky was some kind of sea; and that we are ones that will bare witness to “a great change over.” ♨

We are now living in post-apocalyptic cities where nothing grows and all industrial progress has ceased. The sun never shines here, it is always dark. There are no animals left, we have eaten them all — there are only trees, decrepit buildings, and us. Without animals we no longer have a reference that we can point to and claim the vague animator we call “instinct” exists; nor do we have operational machines to tear into the land. Without these we no longer feel dominion over anything; and even the most Earth loving among us are weak and angry.

The boys are marching off to war. There is a black clothed team and a white clothed team. I’m with the black. This war is a senseless game, neither side has a goal; but people will die, many people will die. While marching into the silent and empty forest I desert my company and build a raft out of old animal bones and twigs. I float down a tame stream and arrive at a place where I am stuck inside a photographic book that is similar to a high school year book. There is always one photo that is animated and talking. The type of dialogue taking place is like that of an evening news show conducting an interview. I am asked what I think the biggest problem we now face is. The page turns and my photograph is animated — in it I am a teenager, I have long hair and I’m wearing a red KGB shirt with a hammer & sickle decal on it. I proclaim proudly (in the way only a teenager can) that it is because we have abandoned ourselves, and that I have never abandoned anything. But my adult self who is wittnessing my talking teenage photograph knows this is not true — I have just abandoned my army.

Beethoven’s 5th symphony begins blasting into the world. I can hear it perfectly, it is precise. The book closes and the trees uproot. The world is receiving its final apocalyptic blows. I am not worried, instead I am marveled by how my dreaming mind is capable of reproducing this complicated music — and I wake up with it still ringing in my ears. ♨

I am with a woman, she is dressed up fancy, in a short black skirt and black top. She is sitting to my left in a dimly lit, outdoor cafe. It is night. Before us is a giant glass cylinder that is partitioned once down the center. There are two tubes snaking out of it that have long syringes attached to their ends. A waiter approaches us and asks if we have decided on our dose. My head is foggy. I point to something on the decorative, hard-bound menu, as does the woman. Moments later he begins pouring a bright yellow fluid into my side of the vat, and then a cobalt blue one into my partner’s. He says that one liter each should be sufficient. I’m nervous, she isn’t. We are supposed to stick the syringes into the veins of our hands — I have never had an intravenous drug before. There’s a lot of fluid in that vat. A lot of fluid. But I rationalize that this venue specializes in this experience, so I settle my tension and ask the waiter to stick me with the needle. Another server approaches my partner, and our soft skin is penetrated simultaneously. Their is a slight twinge of pain and then the giant cylinder begins to purr and the fluids on either side begin to merge, forming a spinning rainbowed tornado. I look into the eye of the woman next to me. Her pupil is wide, black and bottomless, and is surrounded by a thin rim of constellated specs of colors, surrounded by a milky haze and endless white. It fills my vision and becomes like a pulsating mandala . . . “a perfect mirror of my own,” and I think my last thought. Slowly, we begin to melt into the rainbow together . . . free from all worry . . . free from death . . . free from life. ♨